South Africa's universities

Rumbles on campus

How to get more, and better, graduates

CAN Mark Shuttleworth, the South African who this week is enjoying a rather expensive holiday in space, tempt more students to study science? After his return to earth on May 5th, Mr Shuttleworth plans to tour South Africa to convince the young that science is hip. He will have his work cut out. Although employers yearn for maths and science graduates, students prefer softer disciplines such as public administration and the humanities. Only 15% of youngsters, half the rate of a rich country like Britain, make it to campus, and only one in six of these actually earns a degree, says Kader Asmal, the education minister. For black South Africans, the figures are even worse than these averages.

The problem starts in schools, where exam results are poor, not least because a whole generation of students boycotted classes to protest against apartheid. But the universities' misuse of resources plays its part. “We are not getting value for money,” says Mr Asmal.

And quite a lot of money is being spent: a fifth of the budget went last year on education. The country spent about the same in the apartheid years, although it was all wildly skewed towards white South Africans. Today a useful 700m rand ($66m) a year goes on higher education alone. But this is split between 36 universities and technikons, many of them small and run-down, with overlapping courses and remote campuses.

Good universities outside the cities, such as Eastern Cape's Fort Hare university, find it hard to attract capable students or lecturers. Just 532 of its 7,000 students graduated this year, only a handful of them with a master's degree or doctorate. Its prestigious alumni—who include Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki and Robert Mugabe—would be shocked.

The solution is simple, suggested a working group that looked at higher education earlier this year. Use the resources more effectively. Under apartheid there were separate institutes for whites and blacks, often near each other. Many of these should now be merged. And others, particularly in the old black homelands, should be closed: a finger points, for instance, at the indebted, poorly-attended University of Transkei. As many as 15 institutions could go without damage, said Saki Macozoma, a businessman who led the working group.

Unsurprisingly, that provoked fierce protests. Staff, seeing their jobs vanishing, complained that the mostly-white universities would survive unscathed. Why, they asked, should only black-dominated ones be chopped? Because, explained Mr Macozoma, “the brightest and the best black students have already voted with their feet”, fleeing the old black colleges. Mr Asmal agrees. This week the minister took his plans for radical change, including mergers and closures, to the cabinet.

But the reforms will be difficult to push through. Some ministers are reluctant to see their old student homes disappear, and the cabinet postponed taking a decision for two weeks. Mr Asmal is already trapped in one contentious attempt to bring together three distance-learning universities. He had hoped that this merger would go smoothly, but reluctant university staff are being awkward, despite legal threats and warnings that subsidies will be cut. This bodes ill for the wider, necessary, changes to a higher-education system that still needs a lot more than Mr Shuttleworth's goodwill to become world class.